Until last January, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson was chief of staff to Colin Powell at the State Department. Now free from the worry about the political effects of his words, Wilson has unleashed a scathing attack on the policies and internal politics of the Bush administration.
What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.
Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.
Wilkerson believes that the policies of theis cabal, made without the input of other agencies, have jeopardized U.S. security and resulted in bitter battles in the administration among those excluded from the decision making.
If you’re not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster. And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran.
Among Wilkerson’s other charges;
The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was “a concrete example” of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don’t have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you’ve condoned it.”
Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and now secretary of state, was “part of the problem”. Instead of ensuring that Mr Bush received the best possible advice, “she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president”.
The military, particularly the army and marine corps, is overstretched and demoralised. Officers, Mr Wilkerson claimed, “start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam. . . and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel”.
Mr Wilkerson said former president George H.W. Bush “one of the finest presidents we have ever had” understood how to make foreign policy work. In contrast, he said, his son was “not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either”.